After departing Toronto on Monday evening, I arrived in Kabul Wednesday morning having only caught a few brief naps on planes and during a layover in Dubai. I had to laugh as I departed the plane that was full of a mix of Afghanis, American military contractors and a few journalists – as an indication of how misinformed the Western media can be, I watched two television journalists fearfully don their Kevlar flak jackets and battle helmets before departing from the plane as everyone else watched them with rather bemused wonderment. I suspect these journalists are likely to end up cowering inside a NATO base where they can be spoon-fed military briefings and will never speak to an Afghani person on the street.
My project partner Hamayon met me at the airport and we took a short ride to our hotel situated in what he describes as the poor part of Kabul where most foreigners do not venture. As much as I had prepared myself for the devastation of Kabul and I have experienced being in war devastated cities elsewhere, it was still an emotional shock to see a city in this state.
Kabul has periodically experienced artillery and rocket attacks as well as street-to-street warfare for three decades. The ICRC estimates that 80 percent of the city was destroyed by the mid 1990s and little has been rebuilt since the NATO invasion. In this part of town, damaged buildings provide the architectural backdrop for a very few fully intact buildings such as our hotel – bullet-holes and dust provide the decorative elements.
It seems as though the dust of war has never settled in this city – it is picked up and blown about by every slight breeze. The dust is quite oppressive – it gets into everything – clean objects I set down in my hotel room last night were covered with a layer of dust when I woke this morning.
While scarves – chadar – are undoubtedly a symbol of male oppression, they do serve a practical function in resisting the oppressive dust and are used by everyone, regardless of gender, when the wind blows.
Hamayon encouraged me to sleep after my arrival, but I wanted to remain awake until the evening, so I could adapt quickly to the local time. We met over lunch with one of Hamayon's friends who is a student at the Universityof Kabul. It might take some time for my body to get used to sitting on the floor during meals. We sat around a communal eating mat on the floor with another half-dozen people who showed some curiosity at my presence. The food was simple and delicious – qâboli palaw – rice with carrots, raisons and a chunk of lamb. Hamayon tells me he has avoided all raw fruits and vegetables other than onions, but his body has paid a price. I will be cautious, but I will choose, as I have while traveling in places like this in the past, to opt for the chance of a few days of diarrhoea over the certainty of a month of constipation.
Following lunch our friend took us to his room in a very cheap hotel that is largely populated by university students. On the way through the hotel we were assaulted by the stench of the shared toilet facility that is little more than an indoor latrine. As we took tea seated on the floor of our friend's room, I couldn't help but stare at the ceiling decorated in various shades of mould.
Under these unsanitary conditions it is no surprise that our friend's room-mate is quite ill. Later during our visit that stretched into the late evening, our friend demonstrated Afghani healthcare. While Hamayon and I chatted with a growing group of students that gathered to chat and drink tea with us, our friend slipped out and returned with an intravenous bag and needle, various drugs and vitamin supplements and a syringe to inject these into the IV bag. Our friend, with the obvious clumsiness of an amateur nurse, administered the IV to his room-mate. There is virtually no healthcare available here – most healthcare workers fled the country years ago and those who are left serve the wealthy – but our friend explained that drugs, syringes and other medical supplies can be purchased without a prescription for self-care, provided of course one can afford the high cost as well as assuming that one is capable of an accurate self-diagnosis.
Our friend offered to take us for a tour of the University of Kabul and to visit one of the few cafés outside of the international zone where real coffee is available. On the way we passed a number of opulent mansions, quite extraordinary by any standards that are entirely out of place in this landscape of poverty and devastation. Our friend explained that now that there is some stability in Kabul, houses such as these are being built by the warlords and local businessmen who profited handsomely from the years of war as a demonstration of their wealth and power.
Our friend cooked a simple, but delicious meal for us on a camp stove in his room while Hamayon and I entertained heated discussions with the group of firebrand political philosophers that gathered in the room. Even the room-mate revived by his IV medications jumped into the debates that lasted far too late in to the night. Hamayon and I were concerned about our late night walk back to the hotel through the unlit streets, but the incredible starlit sky compensated for our fears.
This morning we went to the offices of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), where some of Hamayon's friends work. The AIHRC has been charged with the job of investigating violations of international law in Afghanistan, such as the recent allegations that Afghanis detained by Canadian troops are turned over to Afghani officials for torture. But the commission is placed in the rather contradictory position of receiving a large part of its funding from the US State Department through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) as well as from the Afghan government. It must be difficult at times for the commission staff to be critical of the hands that feed it. Nonetheless, we were assured that the AIHRC will help us find people affected by the Canadian counterinsurgency mission to interview.
On reading one report of the AIHRC in particular, Hamayon and I were struck by the contradictions of the counterinsurgency mission and the role of AIHRC in monitoring violations of international humanitarian law. This report documents the story of a late night raid of an Afghani home in Kandahar. The report documents how the residents of a home were awakened by banging on their door accompanied by demands that they open the door. Thinking this was a burglary one of the residents went to the roof and was shot at. The door of the home was blown out by explosives – a large group of Afghani soldiers accompanied by two American commanders entered the home zip-locked the hands of the men and placed hoods over their heads. One of the men was booby-trapped by having his hands connected to an explosive charge.
Meanwhile the women were searched by the male soldiers. The contents of the home were destroyed including a computer most of the windows were broken and $600 in cash went missing. As the report states, only when the raiding party discovered documents that identified some of the residents as United Nations staff and staff of the AIHRC were the men released and "told to report to a nearby international military base to receive damages." At the base, the residents were offered $100 in compensation and given an explanation that the Americans involved were contractors and not regular military forces. When the victims refused this settlement on the grounds it was insufficient compensation, the presiding NATO official left the room and “the remaining Afghan forces threatened the victim that if he proceeded with this complaint he would be 'beaten and thrown into jail'.”
Hamayon and I are left wondering what further events would have transpired had the victims been ordinary people and not people of some importance working for the UN and AIHRC? If this kind of counterinsurgency raid happens to people like this who can file a formal complaint, how often do these raids occur and are not reported? We suspect that this reported raid is the tip of the iceberg – few people have the capacity to file a formal complaint and most are fearful of the consequences of doing so.
Thursday afternoon and Friday are the weekend here by edict of the former Taliban government, so we will take the day off as well to visit with Hamayon's friends and possibly venture out of the city to a popular weekend destination nearby.
Kabul, Friday 15 June 2007
Since Friday is the day of rest and all offices are closed Hamayon and I took a break and travelled a short distance out of the city to Kargha Lake, which is the reservoir that provides water for Kabul. Kargha is one of the few places where ordinary Kabulis can find respite from the city, so it is a very popular weekend destination and the road was packed with vehicles, pedestrians and bicycles. On the way we passed hundreds of families living in tents provided by the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and an outdoor school for refugee children run by UNICEF.
Below the dam holding the water of Kargha Lake is the Kabul golf club. This must be one of the most challenging courses in the world. The greens are anything but green – they are black sand. The fairways are grass but this grass is two to three feet high. Until recently, the roughs were still full of landmines as the entire perimeter of the reservoir had been mined to protect Kabul's water supply.
The lake was surrounded with colourful tents full of Kabuli families enjoying picnic lunches and the fine weather. We spent the afternoon in a large tent that serves as a tea house enjoying the view and the breeze off the lake. Our conversation with a small group of young men in their twenties and thirties we were sitting with soon turned to politics. None of these young men are Muslim, all are secular and certainly do not fit the stereotypes portrayed in the North American media of radical Islamic fundamentalists. They are intelligent, articulate and well-informed of global events and their own place in the world. They also represent the cosmopolitan ethnic mix of Afghanistan. Most of all, these young men are full of piss and vinegar – they say they want to fight what they regard as the imperialist occupation of their country by NATO and overthrow the puppet regime of Hamid Karzai. One of the young men told us about what he had witnessed just the day before, as an example of why he is so angry. The young man was on foot crossing the street during a traffic jam. He saw a man he identified as an American in civilian clothes carrying a very large gun get out of one of the cars stuck on the street. The American put the gun to the head of the driver of the car in front and yelled at him to move out of the way. As each car made way, the American proceeded along the line of traffic in the same manner clearing a path for his own driver.
A steady parade of vendors and beggars, mostly children passed through the tent we occupied. One child carried a bathroom scale and would weigh a person in exchange for a few pennies. Each of the young men we were chatting with eagerly took his turn. I was astounded to realise that at 5'8" and reasonably fit I outweighed even the heaviest of these guys by 25 kilos.
These young men are in a terrible state of health. I couldn't help but think of the comparison of these Afghanis with the healthy well-exercised NATO soldiers and military contractors I saw in Dubai who were heading for Iraqand Afghanistan by the planeload. The mismatch of these would be Afghani insurgents against the NATO forces symbolised for me much of what is happening here in Afghanistan at the moment.
We walked a considerable distance towards Kabul after sunset with the returning crowds before finding empty seats on a crowded minibus for the rest of the trip to our hotel. It was late evening before we sat down to a traditional meal of chinakey – a soupy stew cooked in a tea pot. The chinakey is poured from the teapot into a bowl and nan bread is broken into small pieces and added to the bowl. The sloppy mix is then picked up with more nan. It was delicious and filling – a bit too filling for a late night meal and the gallons of green tea that accompany every meal can also make it hard to sleep.
Kabul, Saturday 16 June 2007
Saturday, the beginning of the work week begins with a bang. As we drink our morning tea in our room we notice the distinctive mushroom cloud of an explosion rapidly building about two kilometres along the highway towards Ghazni and Kandahar. Seconds later the concussion of the blast hits our building with a thud. The highway is quickly sealed off and a steady stream of emergency vehicles confirms there must be numerous injuries.
News of the explosion reaches the street quickly and as we proceed to our morning meeting other riders on the bus talk about what they have heard. An ISAF convoy was hit by a remotely activated bomb killing an American soldier (every ISAF soldier is considered American regardless of nationality). The ISAF troops immediately fired indiscriminately into the crowd of morning commuters killing eight civilians. The news report we hear later in the day on the ISAF sponsored television channel confirms that ISAF troops did kill eight civilians and wound one. No mention is made of ISAF casualties, but the news reports state three civilians died in the initial bomb blast and that the Taliban claim responsibility for the bomb.
The general mood of anger and resentment against the occupying army is clear. However, there also seems to be resignation that military force is always accompanied by atrocities committed against civilians. Considering the history of warfare in Afghanistan that has invariably resulted in civilian massacres, such resignation is unsurprising. Nevertheless, some Afghanis initially believed the American-led occupying army would follow the international rules of war and not target civilians. Unfortunately, events have proven such beliefs wrong and resentment of the impunity of the occupying forces is growing.
This morning we met with the editor, Qasim Akhgar, of one of the major newspapers, 8 AM daily, in Kabul. Qasim is considered one of the leading intellectuals in Afghanistan. While we waited for the editor to arrive, we chatted with the assistant editor. We were just getting into an interesting discussion regarding how the privatisation of state services under the orders of the occupation has thrown thousands of Afghanis into unemployment when the editor arrived. We chatted briefly with the editor and he agreed to give us an on-camera interview later in the week.
Later in the morning, in a clandestine meeting in the back of a shop reminiscent of a scene from The Sopranos, we met with a former military commander – a qomandan – who had voluntarily surrendered his arms to the American military. Our Western media would call him a warlord, but while the term warlord has negative connotations in North America, here in Afghanistan, where the services of the state are very unevenly spread, these so-called warlords – more properly recognised as military commander or the Farsi word qomandan – provide security to communities where the state services of police and military often cannot be provided, or are not trusted by the local population. However, the quality of security services provided by these military commanders can range from benign to rapacious. The former qomandan we met has a very good reputation as a responsible protector of his community, who always put the interests of his community before personal gain. The story he told us as well as his humble manner supports his reputation.
As we sat on packing crates drinking the Heinekens that we were unable to refuse, the former warlord told us his story. His Hazara militia was one of the last remaining forces of resistance against the Taliban as Kabul fell in 1996. The Hazara people are the third largest ethnic group in Afghanistan after the Pashtuns. The Hazaras are Farsi speaking and follow Shiite Islam. Consequently, they have always suffered discrimination from the dominant Pashtuns who follow Sunni Islam. During the Taliban takeover in the 1990s many Hazara communities were massacred by the Taliban.
When the Taliban completely surrounded his community, the people recognised that they must negotiate with the Taliban, or suffer either the slow death of starvation under siege, or a fast massacre in a military confrontation. The qomandan was able to negotiate favourable conditions to save the community and maintain his militia.
When the Americans occupied the region in 2001, the community believed they had a reliable ally against the Taliban. Believing the promises made to him that by surrendering his arms the Americans would provide developmental aid for his community the qomandan gave up his arms worth, in his estimation, several million dollars. Unlike many military commanders who profited handsomely from cash payments made for their guns, he gave up his arms in exchange for a promise that his community would benefit from development aid. No aid has materialised and he has been reduced to working as a security guard. He showed us his only reward – a letter of recommendation signed by an American military officer.
Once again his community is faced with the dilemma of facing a slow death by starvation under the American rule of neoliberal economics, or the likelihood of a quick massacre under the Taliban, when the occupiers eventually leave the now defenceless community. We wished the former qomandan farewell and with hopes that he will consider telling his story on-camera provided we will disguise his identity.
After lunch, we headed off in search of the Canadian embassy to Wazir Akbar Khan – a neighbourhood that is home to the wealthy and many embassies. We had an address, but the Canadian embassy was no longer there; apparently it had moved for security reasons and the telephone number I had didn't work either. Asking for directions at other embassies soon turned into a laughing matter as every security guard sent us in a different direction. After almost an hour of walking in circles we found the Canadian embassy hidden behind a massive fortress of earthen walls that closes off an entire city street. After passing through three security checkpoints, we were informed that the embassy was closed for the day. Too late to do anything else we also called it a day and wandered around in downtown Kabul for awhile. Back in our hotel we had dinner while watching the television news with Hamayon valiantly trying to translate for me and eat at the same time. •
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